麻豆传媒

SURVEILLANCE is a fact of life. Your boss is monitoring your performance at work, supermarkets are collecting data on your grocery shopping, face-recognition cameras are tracking where you walk. Now there is a new frontier: the automobile.

In a few months, European Union law-makers are due to rubber stamp proposals that will make a raft of monitoring devices mandatory in cars within three years. All new models of car will come with black boxes, intelligent speed assistants, drowsiness-monitoring cameras and more besides (see 鈥�Eyes on the road鈥�). While the EU is taking the boldest steps, these technologies aren鈥檛 far behind in other parts of the world.

The European Commission, which proposes legislation for the EU, reckons the tech will save more than 7000 lives by 2030. But are we prepared for devices that watch how we drive and try to help us do it better?

When cars feature in the news, the story is usually about their nasty emissions or how to make them drive themselves. Safety isn鈥檛 much discussed, principally because cars are already very safe. In the US, the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is , according to the US Insurance Information Institute 鈥� substantially lower than, for example, dying from accidental poisoning (1 in 64).

The European Commission, however, says that introducing 15 advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) will make driving safer. In a report published in April 2018, it found that the suite of changes 7300 lives by 2030, and reduce the number of serious injuries from car crashes by 38,900. 鈥淲e can have the same kind of impact as when safety belts were first introduced,鈥� says El偶bieta Bie艅kowska, the European commissioner who is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the rules.

She isn鈥檛 alone in her optimism. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a very dramatic change,鈥� says Oliver Carsten, who studies transport safety at the University of Leeds, UK. 鈥淭his is something that could halve fatalities across Europe.鈥�

The tech pulls this off by focusing on the main cause of road accidents: drivers not sticking to the rules, whether accidentally or deliberately. It includes things like lane-keeping assistance, which uses a camera to track road markings and can steer. Crucially, none of the systems are designed to take full control of the vehicle 鈥� drivers can switch them off or override them.

These changes aren鈥檛 just happening in the EU. The US government has published for how it will prepare for more automated driving, with the first step being driver assistance. Australia also has a for more automated vehicles.

Driver-assistance systems aren鈥檛 entirely new. Some, like automatic braking 鈥� which slows a vehicle if it gets too close to an object 鈥� are already present in some cars.

Stay in lane

This means we already have some sense of whether they are effective. Jessica Cicchino at US research agency the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has studied the accident rates for cars with and without these systems by looking at police reports.

She found that automatic braking halves the number of rear end crashes. And systems that warn drivers when they veer out of their lane .

There are concerns about these technologies, however. The main one is that they might lead us to get complacent while driving. A survey by researchers at the University of Iowa found that or frequently feel comfortable doing other things while cruise control is engaged in their vehicle. Another study found that a fifth of drivers thought that ADAS means .

Because of this, assistance tech should come with an education programme, says software engineer at the University of York, UK. McDermid says he once test-drove a car and was told by the salesperson that the lane-keeping assistance meant he could take his hands off the wheel 鈥� as long as the road didn鈥檛 curve too sharply. The salesperson couldn鈥檛 say exactly what that limit was, though, and McDermid was unwilling to find out by trial and error.

The trouble goes beyond that anecdote: half of drivers in the University of Iowa survey said they didn鈥檛 understand how their car鈥檚 automatic braking system worked. 鈥淚 think the driver needs to be given much better training and warning about these things than they actually are,鈥� says McDermid.

It is also important that these systems remain advisory for the time being. It is hard to distil down the skill of driving to concrete, logic-driven decisions that are comprehensible to computer systems. Hills, where road markings can temporarily disappear at the crest, have flummoxed lane-keeping systems, according to IIHS research. 鈥淨uite simply, the technology is not yet mature enough,鈥� says McDermid.

There鈥檚 also the fear that adding more technology to vehicles might make them potential targets for hackers. For instance, Dudi Nassi at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and his colleagues recently showed they could -recognition systems in vehicles by firing images of fake signs at them.

Such concerns might be overblown. Steve Shladover, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, says that when people worry about terrorists hacking cars, he reminds them that there are usually simpler methods available to achieve the same ends.

鈥淗alf of drivers in one survey said they didn鈥檛 understand their automatic braking system鈥�

It would be easy to worry about being watched in your car too. But the EU rules demand that drivers can鈥檛 be identified from any recorded data. Plus, the black box required by the rules is only checked in the event of an accident. The point is to 鈥減rovide for a more equitable allocation of responsibility when a crash occurs鈥�, says Shladover. In the US, such a device continually records, overwriting data until a crash, when it stops recording, keeping only the previous 30 seconds.

People in the US sometimes choose to have a black box because it can reduce their individual insurance premium. Having them in every car might push premiums down for everyone if it encourages people to drive more safely. 鈥淭hese technologies are reducing costs for insurers because they鈥檙e reducing the number of crashes that occur,鈥� says Cicchino.

What鈥檚 more, the data collected in human-driven cars will help train automated driving systems to the point that they could be ready for large-scale deployment in the future. After all, many ADAS systems will be used in automated vehicles. 鈥淭hese are the precursors to automated driving,鈥� says Carsten.

As a result, what may at first glance seem like an intrusive surveillance technology actually looks set to be a benefit for society. 鈥淒rivers should think of it as an extra layer of protection,鈥� says Cicchino, 鈥渞ather than the vehicle trying to take over driving from you.鈥�